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I was standing in line at the supermarket in San Francisco recently, about to drag home my guilty basket of tequila reposado, tonic and avocados. Short of humming Stairway to Heaven and wearing tie-dye I couldn’t have been more obviously a “Boomer.” They marked me down as a member of the “Boomer” generation as surely as a giant Charles Manson forehead tattoo.
Next to me was an infant of around 18 months in a stroller. She was busy playing Angry Birds on her mother’s mobile. It was unclear if she could walk or talk – probably not. But she’ll be attending Comic Con as a Las Vegas “gamer” on it in a couple of years and also at Burning Man festival in the scorching Nevada desert, if her mum’s mobile hasn’t died. Her exhausted mother made no effort to remove it.
Digitally naive? Never, if you’re born after 1997! This is the first generation to be born with a device welded to their paws, the first gen with an intuitive understanding of all things digital, and not much interest in sex – perhaps because of abuse scandals or because they’ve seen too much off-putting online porn and are addicted to gaming?
It’s even said that over-availability of online porn, scarcity of cash and climate change lowers the sperm count, kills off procreation urges and makes these sweet young ones androgynous, tolerant, gentle and gender-fluid.
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Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Sometimes called “the Snowflakes” because they’re sensitive, fragile and intensely parented, they’re told they’re unique and special perhaps a bit too often. They shop at Goodwill, eat at food trucks and worry about climate change. Love pets more than their people. They’re idealistic, diverse, and inclusive. Gay buddies? Of course, why not? Transgender, f’revensakes, sure! (Gays aren’t always transgender-friendly, though.) Will they ever be able to afford cars? Not till Teslas are self-driving and under $10,000. But they adore electric scooters, skateboards, bikes, and not-so-plain electric bikes. And they’ll never pay off their student loans – nor the US national debt, now at $23 trillion dollars, on steroids, and not shrinking under the current regime.
Over a third of Snowflakes sleep with their phones on their pillows and next to their dog, and they awake to check their email and texts often. They then suffer from anxiety attacks. Does this interrupt sleep? And is this lack of sleep hurting their mental health? They are worriers and protester about their futures. From climate change to Me Too and reproductive rights, they’re idealistic, tolerant and very sweetly diverse.
They like to call themselves “woke” or socially conscious, but they’re still teenagers at heart. No silver spoons this time; they were born with silver I-phones, Samsungs or Huaweis surgically implanted in their ears. So they can’t help being digitally “woke.” That would make anybody anxious. While convalescing recently I had my radio on my ear 24/7 and can testify to that.
* * * *
Long, long ago in another galaxy called Maynooth, I read anthropologist Margaret Mead’s seminal work on puberty, Growing Up in Samoa.
Written for her thesis when she was 25 this enthralling read, especially the part on “night crawling in the Long Hut,” can be directly blamed for Boomerdom. But a debunking bestseller in the 1980s by anthropologist Derek Freeman maintained that the Samoans duped Dr Mead. In reality there was no “night crawling” in Samoa, he said. Some day I aim to go there to write my own darn puberty thesis.
Now there’s a second debunker called Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King. It’s another ripping read, mostly because of Mead’s own busy love life. Who can resist the chapter where she and her first husband enter a small hut to sit out the heavy rains in New Guinea’s notorious Highlands when a New Zealander called Reo Fortune walked in – and the story didn’t stop there. But like Freeman and King, I concluded this generation-naming game is just a load of old, well, gamers’ Com Con.
If succeeding generations own aspirations or revolt against the previous one, they demand names.
* * * *
Long, long ago in yet another galaxy not too far away, teenagers were the people who were never “woke”. They couldn’t wake up in the morning to save their lives. They dreamed of owning Mustangs. I look at the gaggles of today’s teenagers hiking uphill past my front door and wonder if they’re all as vegetarian and lovable as they look?
Are today’s Zoomers really so different from yesterday’s Boomers? Who are they going they be, this post-millennial post-techie Generation Z?
What should we call this one, since “Z” is rather, er, final?
If we were Boomers, will they be Zoomers?